As part of his Master of Public Administration coursework at Western Carolina University, Kasey Baker enrolled in Professor Christopher Cooper’s “Policy Analysis” course – one of 33 courses to participate in the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative in the spring term. Kasey was surprised to hear that his work for the course included writing a Wikipedia article on a course-related topic.

One of Kasey’s first tasks was to select a mentor from the available Online Ambassadors.

“Let me sum up my online mentor, Alex Dunkel (AKA VisionHolder), in two words: ‘Amazing Rockstar,’” Kasey says of his choice. “With 26 GA articles and 16 Featured articles under his belt, there was almost nothing he did not know about Wikipedia. From the onset, we realized we both were huge nerds that liked HTML formatting and well-cited materials. After spending what was close to 30+ hours on Skype, we not only produced a fantastic article, but we became friends as well. Without his help, my article would have not been anywhere near the quality it is currently nor would I have enjoyed the experience as much as I did.”

Kasey Baker is a master's student at Western Carolina University.

Kasey’s focus in grad school is on environmental policy, and he’d recently become interested the United States’ nuclear policy. After extensive research on Wikipedia, he discovered that there was no unifying article that summed up U.S. policy; instead, there were several smaller articles that often carried neutrality warnings at the top of the page. Alex, in his role as online mentor, warned Kasey that it would be a difficult undertaking – but Kasey wanted to ensure that this important facet of U.S. policy had a Wikipedia article, so he accepted the challenge.

“This assignment was probably the most intense and heavily researched assignment I have ever done,” he says. “When I was looking at my graduate writing on the nuclear policy history, I realized that many sources were biased or did not meet the quality standard that Wikipedia expected. This was not saying they were unreliable sources, I simply felt that they might not pass the scrutiny of all those who would be looking at them. Moreover, properly citing the materials on my Wikipedia page was far more extensive than that of any other academic writings I’ve ever produced.”

As Kasey began to work on his article, the Fukishima nuclear disaster struck, bringing increased attention to Kasey’s fledgling article. His submission to the Did You Know process brought more attention to his article – including more than 3,000 views on the day his article appeared on Wikipeda’s main page. And Kasey started understanding more and more why so many of the nuclear articles had that neutrality tag applied.

“At every step of the process, I’ve had people fight my article in some way,” he laments. “Fortunately, it has usually been over the title and other minor details that people blew out of proportion. Because I kept my information strictly about policy and made sure it was 100% accurate from reputable sources, no one could accuse the information in my article as being inaccurate or biased.”

He feels some more recent additions to the article’s current events section have the potential to detract from the article’s quality, if other authors do not refine the changes and improve the updates, but it hasn’t caused Kasey to stop working on Wikipedia. Part of that is thanks to his mentor, Alex, who helped him every step of the way. And Kasey realizes that the next topic he tackles on Wikipedia will be one that is less controversial – and he hopes to have another class where the course assignment is to write Wikipedia articles.

“I wholeheartedly prefer writing a Wikipedia article to a traditional paper,” Kasey says. “Most papers, even in graduate school, are almost never shared with the academic community, much less with the general public. With this project, I feel that I am not only able to share my research, but can have a real conversation with others about nuclear policy. Not to mention by creating a Wikipedia article, it expands the information available to anyone curious about the topic. I honestly wish that other classes would involve the submission of Wikipedia articles like this more often.”

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LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

With two Public Policy Initiative classes completed, Georgetown University’s Patrick Friedel is one of the most experienced student participants in the Wikimedia Foundation’s education program – and Patrick’s experiences have taught him a lot about how Wikipedia works, especially on articles that receive thousands of visitors.

Patrick Friedel lived in Cairo for two years, which inspired him to improve the Wikipedia article on the National Democratic Party of Egypt.

Patrick, a master’s student in Arab Studies, began his Wikipedia editing career in the fall of 2010 in Professor Rochelle Davis’s class, “Introduction to the Study of the Arab World.” Having lived and studied in Cairo, Egypt, for two years, Patrick was surprised to discover that the article on the National Democratic Party of Egypt was only a start class article.

He started making significant changes to the National Democratic Party of Egypt (NDP) article in late October 2010, and had finished the changes required for his class by mid-November.

“The previous NDP article provided precious little historical data on the party as well as no context for the environment in which the party operated. Both, in my opinion, were crucial to fully understanding the NDP,” Patrick says. “In writing the article, I learned a great deal about the leadership, government, and corruption in modern Egypt, and how single-party politics had been so successful at stifling democratic reforms.”

Patrick’s article was receiving an average of about 100 views a day, although that spiked when it was featured on Wikipedia’s main page in the “Did you know?” section. But then things in the Arab world started to change. People in Tunisia hit the streets in December, and Egypt began its own revolution on January 25. As people around the world started searching for information on President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling political party, they landed on the article Patrick had, two months earlier, taken from a little more than a stub to a fully developed article. On the “Day of Anger” on January 28, when the National Democratic Party Headquarters in Cairo burned, his article received more than 5,000 views.

“As the revolution continued over the weeks, thousands continued to visit the article each day,” Patrick says. “I truly felt like I had contributed something meaningful — a resource for understanding the roots of the revolution. Additionally, the article was well cited, therefore assisting interested readers in researching the subject more thoroughly.”

As more and more people visited the page, Patrick’s article began to receive edits from other Wikipedians. Many editors made suggestions on the talk page, and some wanted to remove sections in the article. Patrick sought out help from Online Ambassador mentors, who helped him navigate the attention from many voices.

“One detractor was insistent that I remove the contextual information I had included in the article. He contended that the ‘Electoral System in Egypt’ was erroneous to the scope of the article. Of course, I disagreed. I argued that it was impossible to understand the motives and operations of the NDP without understanding the dynamics of the political system. For example, the only way to comprehend how the NDP won supermajorities in parliament for decades is to know that competing parties are tightly regulated, censored, and often banned,” Patrick explains. “But I did not have to worry, because like all things on Wikipedia, things worked themselves out. Other editors stepped in, including an Online Ambassador, on my behalf, and reiterated the value of the section.”

As Patrick continued to make edits to his article long after the end of his class, keeping it up to date as events unfolded in Egypt, he also started working on another article for a course he was enrolled in for the spring term, Professor Adel Iskander’s “Arab Media” class.

Patrick created the article on Dream TV, a satellite network that hosts a television show called “10:00 p.m.” which would also play a role in the Egypt revolution: Wael Ghonim, the Google executive and internet democracy activist, was interviewed on the show immediately after his detention by Egyptian authorities. The emotional interview prompted hundreds of thousands of Cairenes to again flood Midan Tahrir in downtown Cairo. Two days later, Mubarak resigned.

“Compared to other assignments, our participation in the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative felt especially significant,” Patrick says. “Not only were we learning how to contribute effectively to the Wikipedia community, skills which I believe are transferable outside the classroom, but our articles were being presented to a community outside our immediate academic circle. Typically, we write for ourselves and our professors. Writing for Wikipedia means that anyone can consume our research, which is exhilarating. One of my peers likened it to being peer-reviewed by thousands of people.”

Although Patrick was initially skeptical of the value of a Wikipedia assignment, he’s now a firm believer in integrating Wikipedia into university curricula. Although he doesn’t seek out articles to make broad changes to beyond the ones in his class, he has been making minor edits to correct errors or add missing facts to articles he reads.

“It is odd. My peers and I knew that Wikipedia was a collaborative encyclopedia — anyone can edit articles. However, it was not until we took a class with a Wikipedia component that we began making edits ourselves. This is not only a skill, but it offers a new outlook on Wikipedia — one that places Wikipedia into a space where we are all much more comfortable building it,” Patrick says. “The courses with Wikipedia components are really game changers. Aside from the Wikipedia content produced by the students for the class, the Wikimedia Public Policy Initiative introduced us to the idea that we can and should contribute to Wikipedia articles.”

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LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

June traditionally marks the end of the academic year in the United States, which means that the first year of the pilot project to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms, the Public Policy Initiative, has come to an end. Over the next few months, we’ll be reflecting on the successes and the challenges of our program, but here’s an initial overview of all we’ve accomplished.

Student contributions

This chart shows the number of bytes students participating in the Public Policy Initiative added to the English Wikipedia's article namespace each month.

Over the two terms of the Public Policy Initiative, more than 800 students were introduced to Wikipedia editing as part of their coursework. In the fall term, we worked with 14 classes. In the just-completed spring term, we worked with 33. The chart at right shows the number of bytes our students added to articles. All told, students contributed 8.8 million bytes to the English Wikipedia this academic year. That’s the equivalent of more than 5,800 pages of content to Wikipedia. Put another way, that’s 11 reams of paper filled with new content.

The best part is, the content students are adding is of high quality. On average, public policy articles within the project improved by 140 percent, based on a numerical weighted ranking as assessed by Wikipedia experts and public policy experts. The articles went from an average score of 6.88 before the project to a score of 16.54 after the students completed their work. Our research analyst, Amy Roth, is busy crunching numbers, so look for an expanded report to be published on the Outreach wiki this summer.

Wikipedia Ambassador Program

Wikipedia Ambassadors work with Professor Aaron Frank's class at the University of San Francisco.

One of the biggest successes of the Public Policy Initiative is starting the Wikipedia Ambassador program. Two types of Wikipedia Ambassadors have been trained: Campus Ambassadors, who teach students how to edit Wikipedia through in-class presentations, and Online Ambassadors, who serve as virtual mentors for students on-wiki.

Nearly 60 people have been trained as Campus Ambassadors, and they’ve had success in growing Wikipedia’s presence on university campuses around the United States. Some Ambassadors are even taking on responsibilities beyond in-class work (see this feature on the Montana State pod). One great feature of the Campus Ambassador program is that it opens participation in our projects to new people. Not all Campus Ambassadors are traditional Wikipedia editors, but they have all shown tremendous enthusiasm in their roles of spreading the word about Wikipedia editing to new people. The Campus Ambassador role lets us put their outreach skills to use in supporting our projects, even if they choose not to contribute content.

Online Ambassadors are experienced Wikipedians with a track record of good content development and newbie assistance. More than 90 Wikipedians are available to serve as wiki mentors for the students, answering questions on-wiki, through the IRC channel #wikipedia-en-classroom, and via email. Online Ambassadors have helped guide their students through the Did You Know process, which we’ve found to be a huge motivator for students, who really enjoy having their articles featured on Wikipedia’s main page.

Resources for instructors

Alex Jones, a professor at Harvard, used Wikipedia in his class in the spring.

The professors we worked with often asked for a sample syllabus, hints on assignment design, and materials they could distribute to students that would help them learn. We developed a new Education Portal that serves as a clearinghouse for all the information we’ve collected that’s of use to instructors. The education portal contains reasons why Wikipedia assignments are useful for professors and students, case studies of successful courses, and support materials professors need as they plan their courses. If you’ve seen other syllabi that incorporate Wikipedia assignments, we encourage you to add them to the Education Portal.

Looking forward

The Public Policy Initiative was a pilot project that had two aims: (1) improve the content of U.S. public policy articles on the English Wikipedia, and (2) see if the Wikimedia Foundation could enhance the relationship between Wikipedia and academia. We’re excited to say we’ve accomplished both, and we’re eager to broaden the work we’ve already started with our new Global University Program.

Volunteer Regional Ambassadors will continue the work of recruiting Campus Ambassadors and professors in the United States, with training support from the Wikimedia Foundation. We have ambitious goals to increase the number of courses participating in the United Sates to 50 in the fall term and 80 by spring 2012. Already, our Regional Ambassadors are working to recruit new professors, across any discipline.

Campus Ambassador Trainer PJ Tabit explains a facet of working with professors to new Campus Ambassador trainees in Pune, India.

As the name global implies, we’re also eager to get the program started in other countries and on other Wikipedias as well. For the next academic year, we expect to see universities in India, the U.K., and Canada (and maybe more) using Wikipedia in the classroom with the support of Wikipedia Ambassadors. Last week, Wikimedia Foundation staff trained the first cohort of Campus Ambassadors in Pune, which will be the location of our pilot in India, and the classes these Campus Ambassadors will be supporting are starting in a few weeks.

With our global expansion, we’re looking forward to working with community members around the world to get university programs going in every country. Interested in helping? Become a Wikipedia Ambassador, or point a professor you know in the direction of the new Education Portal. Start a discussion on our talk page. Join us as we explore the next chapter of Wikipedia’s partnership with academia.

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LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

Mike Cline is a long-time Wikipedia contributor, and Bonnie McCallum is a long-time Wikipedia evangelist — together, they form the Campus Ambassador pod at Montana State University. And over the course of the last five months, Mike and Bonnie have transformed Bozeman, Montana, into a Wikipedia hub.

They’ve supported MSU Professor Kristin Ruppel’s class, “Federal Indian Policy and Law,” this term, as she assigned her students to edit Wikipedia articles as part of the curriculum. They are starting a Wikipedia student club on the Bozeman campus. They had a Wikipedia information table set up in the student union building. They’ve set up office hours in the university library, where they answer student questions related to Wikipedia. They’re preparing to present about their Wikipedia experiences to the Tribal College Librarians Institute in June, and they’ve already registered for a Wikipedia booth at Catapolooza, a campus-wide festival in August.

“I believe it’s important to demonstrate to academics that Wikipedia is a place of scholarship and that academia should be engaged and participating in Wikipedia,” Bonnie says. “So far, I’ve not met, or talked to, or emailed a single person who does not use Wikipedia, and it is fun for me to be able to tell folks that MSU-Bozeman has a graduate class that instead of writing term papers writes articles to Wikipedia.”

The Wikipedia Ambassador Program originated with the Public Policy Initiative, but it’s been growing ever since. Volunteer Campus Ambassadors like Bonnie and Mike work in class with students who have been assigned to edit Wikipedia for part of their course grade. Online Ambassadors are their virtual counterparts, helping students on-wiki and through IRC. Campus Ambassadors can be either experienced Wikipedians like Mike or new editors who have a lot of enthusiasm for teaching others about Wikipedia like Bonnie.

“The best part about being a Campus Ambassador is the opportunity to work with young students and adults on interesting academic subjects and the opportunity to convince academia that Wikipedia is indeed a valuable and reliable source of scholarship,” Mike says. “Students who took their Wikipedia assignment seriously were sincerely appreciative of the mentoring and help provided by the Ambassadors.”

Mike and Bonnie supported Professor Ruppel’s students via in-class presentations on Wikipedia editing and culture, Q&A sessions, pep talks, weekly office hours in the academic library, one-on-one counseling by appointment, and a class-time lab session in the library computer classroom. Bonnie, on staff at MSU Bozeman, got the library blog to post an item about their project, and the student newspaper covered their activities as well. Each of Bonnie and Mike’s outreach activities brings more people on board to their new Wikipedia student club, whose activities will begin in the fall term.

“Everyone, students and staff alike, always respond with ‘I use Wikipedia!’ Then they immediately add something like ‘That’s cool!’ or ‘How does that work?’ or ‘I had no idea that was going on,’ or ‘But I thought Wikipedia couldn’t be trusted,’” Bonnie says. “Telling people about being a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador opens up a door to conversations about their own Wikipedia experiences, and we can explain about neutral point-of-view, tertiary source, verifiability, notability, the history tab, and other projects at Wikimedia besides Wikipedia. Most folks are surprised to find out they’re already empowered to become active Wikipedians. They’ve just never thought about Wikipedia from the collaborative, participative perspective before.”

As the spring term wraps up, Bonnie and Mike are busy meeting with Professor Ruppel to debrief about how the first term went. Professor Ruppel is already planning to use Wikipedia again in her class next term, and Bonnie and Mike are identifying what worked best and what they should do differently next time around. They’re also trying to recruit more Campus Ambassadors on the MSU-Bozeman campus. And they’d like to expand Wikipedia Campus Ambassador presence to the entire Montana University System: all Montana State University (MSU) system campuses, all University of Montana (U of M) system campuses, all seven Montana Tribal Colleges and three Community Colleges, and all three Montana Independent Colleges. They want to see Wikipedia editing as part of the curriculum in every college in Montana.

It’s an ambitious goal, but if anyone can do it, it’s Bonnie and Mike. In Mike’s regular job, he teaches and mentors groups of corporate leaders and teams on a variety of business processes, so expanding his teaching to Wikipedia is a logical step. Bonnie’s professional experience in the semiconductor and IT industries gave her a deep appreciation for open-source, shared knowledge, tools, and applications.

“Volunteering my time and energies in support of a worldwide free-access, neutral point-of-view, and verifiable information repository such as Wikipedia is a path I am willing to travel,” Bonnie says. “Wikipedia Campus Ambassadorship is for those who like a challenge, are comfortable working with unknowns, like working with others to solve problems, and enjoy constantly learning new stuff. Nothing is written in stone. In fact, there are no stones. The upside to the days when one is feeling like you’re walking around in a wiki-daze is that you know you’re building something wonderful for the whole world to use for free. You just steady-on.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

UC Berkeley undergrad Kevin Gorman started editing Wikipedia as part of his coursework, but he's become a Wikipedian in the process.

Prior to January 2011, University of California at Berkeley undergraduate Kevin Gorman‘s contributions to Wikipedia were a few edits to geology-related articles, but he’d never bothered to register for a user account. Then Kevin, a Scandinavian studies major, enrolled in a classed called “Politics of Piracy,” participating in the Wikimedia Foundation’s new University Program in the spring 2011 term. As part of the class, Kevin was required to register for a user account and make substantive contributions to a Wikipedia article as part of class.

Kevin’s instructors and Campus Ambassadors gave him and his classmates an introduction to how to edit Wikipedia, and Kevin was hooked – not just contributing to the article on the court case Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google Inc. – his chosen article for class – but also contributing to articles on mushrooms and becoming involved with the team that patrols new pages.

“The way I got interested in mushrooms to begin with was that I realized there was not a single species of mushroom I could identify by sight. I’ve been working on fixing that ever since – and now I’m applying my new-found knowledge to Wikipedia,” Kevin says. “The relationship between different kinds of mushrooms is becoming a lot clearer now that we can do genetic comparisons, so the field is changing rapidly. Due to this rapid change, a lot of the information on Wikipedia currently is out of date. I’ve found contributing to Wikipedia’s mushrooms articles to be an interesting application of what I’ve learned and also an interesting way to learn more things. I can look at an article and say ‘I know that name is out of date, but I’m not sure what the right one is,’ and then I can go through the literature to find what the current name is and update the Wikipedia article with that citation.”

In addition to his article editing contributions, Kevin’s also become part of a team of editors who monitor newly created pages to ensure the topics meet Wikipedia’s notability requirements. He was perusing an article one day and noticed a sentence that seemed strange. There was a wikilink in the sentence to an article about a company.

“I Googled the company, and they didn’t exist, so I deleted the reference in the first page, and nominated the article about the company for deletion,” Kevin says. “The creator of the page ended up responding to me in about 20,000 words. It got me sucked into deleting things that don’t follow Wikipedia’s policies.”

Sucked in he is: Kevin intends to keep contributing to Wikipedia long after his class ends. In fact, Kevin will be taking over teaching the “Politics of Piracy” class — it’s part of a student-led courses program at Berkeley called DeCal — next term, and he will be integrating Wikipedia throughout his version of the course as well.

“In general, I like Wikipedia assignments more than doing something like a traditional paper,” Kevin says. “When you write a final paper for a class, it’s useless after the class – it can be a good reinforcement of the course material, but nobody will ever read it again. Doing something on Wikipedia, we are making a lasting contribution, and it has the potential to get people a bit more sucked into their topic than say writing an 8-page paper would.”

And Kevin’s looking to recruit more than just current students to become Wikipedia editors. He’s been attending mycology society meetings and hopes to eventually entice some of their members in to contributing to WikiProject Fungi.

“I’d like to convert some of the mycologists from making jokes about Wikipedia and mushrooms to actually contributing to Wikipedia’s content about mushrooms,” he says. “And it’s a useful thing to not just contribute what you already know, but to find what you should know. You can expand your own base of knowledge by contributing. The more people who contribute to Wikipedia, the more useful it will become.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Michel Aaij’s Wikipedia resume is impressive – more than 60,000 edits, a couple of Good Articles, a Featured List, almost 150 Did You Knows. But there’s one credit he’s most proud of: tenure.

For North American professors, tenure is one of the pinnacles of success in academia. Junior professors spend years building a portfolio that demonstrates teaching, research, and service to the discipline, then face a committee who evaluates the portfolio and determines whether to give the professor a lifetime position at that university or ask the professor to leave.

For Michel, a cornerstone of his tenure portfolio was Wikipedia.

Michel has been editing for years, especially on biographies of living persons, academia topics, and Dutch subjects (he’s originally Dutch). And he’s spent a fair amount of time copyediting, helping resolve disputes, and welcoming new editors. (He’s also a Campus Ambassador, helping students become contributors through the Public Policy Initiative). On the academic side, Michel started publishing in scholarly journal articles and working on a book, all while teaching in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama.

A little more than a year ago, Michel started telling his fellow colleagues about his Wikipedia activities.

“I quickly found raised eyebrows and skepticism,” Michel admits. But he won his colleagues over by showing them the peer-reviewed aspects of Wikipedia, like the Good Article and Featured Article processes. And he contributed to articles particularly useful to Auburn University Montgomery, including the article on the school and a biography of a colleague, who told Michel that was really cool.

“I’ve written articles in many areas, and in many cases I could show my colleagues what I had done in their field,” Michel says. “I’d like to think that by now most of them have a favorable opinion of Wikipedia. Let’s face it: Guillaume de Dole, now a Good Article, there’s no database entry or encyclopedic article anywhere that compares to the Wikipedia article on that poem (and I realize that that says as much about Wikipedia as about the anywhere else).”

Michel Aaij also contributes photos to Wikimedia Commons, including this photo of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. That's his daughter sitting on the steps.

Michel felt that his contributions to Wikipedia merited mention in his tenure portfolio; after all, his colleagues had come around about the resource academia traditionally frowns upon after seeing what he had done. He thought the “service” section would be the logical fit. The least important of the three sections in terms of the tenure decision, the service area gives professors a chance to explain how their work in the field has benefitted knowledge about the topic. Michel wrote a few pages on how Wikipedia works, how he’d contributed, and how his edits to specific articles benefitted literary and medieval scholarship.

A few weeks before the portfolio was due, two of his colleagues (the poet he had written up and an eighteenth-century scholar with whom he chats regularly) suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under “research” as well. And at many universities, the decision hinges in large part on the research section – where the “publish or perish” phrase comes from. Candidates for tenure must demonstrate that they have published in peer-reviewed publications.

Michel added the articles he’d achieved Good Article status for under the research section, including two that were going through the review process, and added articles that had appeared in the Did You Know section of the main page on medieval and literary topics, as well as topics about Montgomery, Alabama, the town in which his university is located.

“It took a bit of shuffling and organizing, but in the end I had a meaty section on Wikipedia and my work there under research, based on the claim that Did You Knows, Good Articles, and Featured Articles are all scrutinized more or less during a peer-review process,” Michel says. “I had supporting materials in the forms of articles I had written in both research and service. In the end, I suggested (based on the advice of three of my colleagues) that Wikipedia articles were no worse than for instance those published by the GALE databases–it is worthwhile adding that we had just hired a new chair partly on the basis of such bibliographic articles.”

Michel’s tenured colleagues approved him unanimously, and the campus-wide committee awarded him tenure last month, marking perhaps the first time that a professor has received tenure in part due to his Wikipedia contributions. Michel expects his academic C.V. was strong enough to support his tenure without his Wikipedia contributions, but he’s glad he included them. As more and more professors applying for tenure follow Michel’s lead, tenure committees across academia will need to begin adjusting guidelines to give adequate weight to Wikipedia contributions.

Now that Michel has been awarded tenure, he’s turning his focus to the next step: taking up janitorial duties by becoming a Wikipedia administrator.

A tenured professor who wants to clean up after pranks and silly nonsense on Wikipedia? If only there were more of them.

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

By PJ Tabit and Dominic McDevitt-Parks

Christina Aguilera made international headlines in February for erroneously singing a line about halfway through her performance of the American national anthem. And while one could have foreseen the wave of criticism that would follow, some media reports included a surprising myth—that Christina Aguilera’s flawed lyrics originated on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has become a very high-profile project, even a cultural phenomenon, and at this point an introduction to navigating its page history  is probably in order. You may be familiar with the idea of Wikipedia—but you may not be as familiar with how it works in practice.  Using this specific example, let us explore some features of Wikipedia that could be used to fact-check the claim about Wikipedia’s role in her mistake.

The 'View history' link at the top of a Wikipedia article leads to a list of all the changes made to it and previous versions.

Conveniently, every change made to every Wikipedia article is archived and can easily be accessed by clicking the “View history” tab at the top of the article. You will notice a list of edits presented in chronological order and accompanied by name of the author. This allows us to establish a timeline of when an article was created, when edits were made, and how long they lasted until they were removed. A typical line from a page history looks like this:

Typical entry in the history of a Wikipedia article

The “cur” link will show you the difference between that past version and the article’s live version highlighted in red, while the “prev” link will show the changes made in that edit, by comparing the revision with the previous one. The radio buttons allow one to compare changes made across several edits at once. Clicking the timestamp will display the content of the page as it appeared after that edit. Next, we see the username of the editor, which links to their userpage, along with links to their talk page and the history of their contributions. Finally, the comment which follows the page’s size in bytes is an “edit summary,” an optional description an editor may include with their edit so that people looking at page histories can easily see what change they made.

So what about that story that Christina Aguilera’s bungling of the national anthem at the Super Bowl was due to an erroneous edit to the lyrics in Wikipedia? As she performed for a Super Bowl audience of over 100 million viewers, Aguilera’s Wikipedia article saw a predictable uptick in edits, especially vandalism. If we wade through the page history to the version of the article prior to the Super Bowl (which occurred on February 6) you’ll notice that the lyrics are correctly represented.

Let’s move forward in time. With just a little sleuthing you will notice that the offending edit was made at 23:51 UTC on February 6, 2011. This means the change occurred at 5:51 p.m. CST, after Christina Aguilera had sung the Anthem. In fact, the page history also reveals that a reference to her rendition had already been added to the article before the lyrics were ever changed, and then removed because the incident was so new that there were no news sources to use for citations. The vandalism to the lyrics managed to remain for eight minutes before being removed, which is not a very wide window in which Aguilera could have read it even if it had occurred sometime before the Super Bowl.

While the now-infamous mistake was not inspired by Wikipedia, the fact that Wikipedia was ever implicated is something of a comedy of errors. First, Christina Aguilera sang the wrong lyrics; then an anonymous editor, either in jest or believing Aguilera’s version was correct, changed the article to reflect the singer’s view for only a few minutes; and finally, a reporter stumbled upon—or was tipped off to—this old version of the article.

As a result, people unfamiliar with Wikipedia may now believe that the website is to blame for the Super Bowl performance. Of course, one erroneous story alone will hardly ruin Wikipedia’s reputation, but it does serve as a reminder that Wikipedia can often become news. With nearly 200,000 edits per day, and more than 100 per minute, many of which are short-lived, it would behoove us all to know just a little bit more about the inner-workings of Wikipedia—especially when knowing those details might mean breaking a story, or debunking a false report.

To find out more about using page histories, please see Wikipedia’s help page on the subject and the essay “How to read an article history”.

PJ Tabit is a graduate student at The George Washington University in Washington, DC pursuing a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP). In addition, he is a research associate in the Government and Finance Division of the Congressional Research Service and a Campus Ambassador to two classes at Georgetown University.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks is a Campus Ambassador for an undergraduate public relations course at Simmons College, where he is also a student in the dual-degree history & archives management master’s program. He is also an editor and administrator for Wikipedia and Wiktionary. He is a graduate of Reed College and is currently interning at the USS Constitution Museum.

A key piece of Wikimedia’s strategic plan is to close the gender gap by encouraging more women to participate in projects. One area where we already see progress is the Wikipedia Ambassadors program, developed in conjunction with the Public Policy Initiative. During the 2010-11 academic year, university students across the United States are writing Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework, and they learn the Wikipedia basics from trained Campus Ambassadors who come into the classroom to teach students how to start contributing.

These Campus Ambassadors are the first face of the Wikimedia movement that most students have seen, and 27 of the 59 Campus Ambassadors this term (that’s 46%) are women. At Indiana University Bloomington, for example, six Campus Ambassadors assist three classes of students — and five of them are women.

“I think I am putting a face on Wikipedia instead of it just being a web site that people use,” says Chanitra Bishop, a librarian at IU and one of the five female Campus Ambassadors there. “Hopefully, if students and professors have thought about becoming involved, they will see that they can and that they have unique knowledge to contribute.” Likewise, Indiana Library and Information Science master’s student Beth Brockman was drawn to becoming a Campus Ambassador because of her desire to make Wikipedia a better resource for anyone to use, but she thinks seeing women teaching about Wikipedia in university classrooms can be an inspiration to the female students in the class.

Chanitra’s and Beth’s views are echoed across their cohort. They don’t focus on being role models for female students. Instead, they try to ease all students into the joys of editing Wikipedia — and closing the gender gap is a nice side effect of their work.

“I would hope that I am providing a model for any new editor, not just women, and I would hope that I am contributing to making Wikipedia a professional and respectful environment,” says Adrianne Wadewitz, a longtime Wikipedian. “Being a Campus Ambassador allows me to join together two things about which I’m passionate: Wikipedia and teaching. It allows me to show professors how useful Wikipedia can be as a teaching tool and it allows me to learn, in turn, from students and other teachers about a variety of subject matters and techniques for communicating.”

Campus Ambassadors were trained in five regions across the United States in January, including a training in Indianapolis, pictured here.

Ellie Dahlgren is a staff member at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana, and she agrees with Adrianne that her primary focus as a Campus Ambassador is on what the students get out of the Wikipedia assignment.

“I like challenging instructors to think about teaching and learning in different ways,” Ellie says. “I like being part of a team that creates unique and practical (i.e., real-world) experiences for students.”

And it’s not just Campus Ambassadors closing the gender gap. More than half of the 600 students contributing to Wikipedia through the Public Policy Initiative this term are women. Two classes feature an all-women roster: women’s college Simmons’ “Public Relations Seminar” and Georgetown University’s “Women and Human Rights.”

Brenda Burk is a librarian at nearby Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and she travels to Bloomington to assist in the classrooms there. Becoming a Campus Ambassador has given Brenda a new way to connect with students, she says. Brenda says the principles librarians support — understanding resources, determining source reliability, and verifiability — complement Wikipedia well. And she’s particularly excited to see the students in her class continue contributing to such an important resource.

“Seeing me use Wikipedia and edit encourages them to jump in,” Brenda says of her students. “In the class, the women are a bit more cautious starting to edit and create articles. Once they start and become comfortable in this environment they get excited about it. Hopefully the enthusiasm continues.”

Learn more about the Public Policy Initiative, the Wikipedia Ambassador program, and the classes involved so far at WikiProject United States Public Policy.

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

The Wikimedia Foundation’s program to get Wikipedia editing into university classrooms – the Public Policy Initiative – has wrapped up its first term of work, and we’re already working hard on the next term! Over the last two weeks, I’ve been posting profiles of students who participated in the Public Policy Initiative last fall: Peter Elliot, Nicole Anderson, Graham Rogers, Abbie Taylor, and Adrian Bien. Each of these five students wrote Wikipedia articles for a grade last term and really enjoyed the experience.

Campus Ambassadors at the Washington, D.C. training get into the editing spirit by editing a quote on Georgetown University's campus.

As I listened to their stories, common themes emerged: how the Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors had eased their transitions into Wikipedia, how they felt much more invested in the assignment when writing for the global Wikipedia community rather than just for their professor, how honored they felt to share their knowledge with the world. We’ve seen these themes echoed across the students in all of the 14 classes we worked with last term.

“It was a good way to make our class-related research useful to the public,” Kristin Broughton, a master’s student at George Washington University, said.

“I love the idea that you do something that is actually real,” added a Harvard University student during an open forum.

“I feel a little silly being so excited,” wrote another student to her professor after learning her article would be featured on the Did You Know? section on Wikipedia’s front page.

Overall, the students were able to get 20 articles featured in Did You Know?, and our 207 participants combined to contribute more than 2 million bytes to Wikipedia — that’s the equivalent of more than six printed pages per student. We at the Wikimedia Foundation learned a lot in the process, too. Many of our biggest challenges and problems from the fall could have been ameliorated if interactions between students and Online Ambassadors had occurred sooner and more frequently; for the spring term, it’s now a requirement that every student be paired with an Online Ambassador “mentor” throughout the term. We’ve also worked more closely with professors on syllabus design to space milestones throughout the term, so students’ learning curve for Wikipedia-editing is smoother and so students have fewer opportunities for procrastination.

These changes are on display in our spring batch of classes. Twenty-nine courses – to date – are participating in the Public Policy Initiative in the spring, spread all across the United States. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program is growing rapidly, with 51 Campus Ambassadors and 59 Online Ambassadors supporting students this spring (all of these numbers are likely to go up in the coming months). We’re still recruiting more Online Ambassadors, and we encourage anyone with an interest in helping newcomers with content development to apply.

With every step of the way, we’re looking toward sustainability. The Wikipedia Ambassador Steering Committee is a volunteer-run group that ensures the continuity of our work in university classrooms. Already, Wikimedia chapters and volunteers around the globe are starting to form their own Ambassador programs, and we look forward to watching organic growth of Wikipedia’s use as a teaching tool.

Come be a part of our project! Join WikiProject United States Public Policy, help with the article quality assessment team that’s measuring our impact, become an Online Ambassador, sign up here if you’re interested in being a Campus Ambassador, or just subscribe to our weekly newsletter. We look forward to your ideas and contributions.

LiAnna Davis, Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Note: This blog post is the fifth in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

Georgetown University junior Adrian Bien was excited when he first heard he’d be editing Wikipedia for his “Theorizing Culture and Politics” class last fall. But as the Cleveland, Ohio, native started to learn wiki markup and the guidelines for articles, he realized how much work it would be, which dampened his enthusiasm.

That didn’t last long. Once Adrian’s Campus Ambassadors, Rob Pongsajapan and Yonatan Moskowitz, gave an overview of editing and answered questions, he was delving in to the intricacies of Wikipedia.

“It was definitely a pleasant surprise,” Adrian says of his experience. “I was very pleased overall with the Wikipedia assignment instead of writing another dull paper. As I see it, I’d rather spend thirty hours putting work into a project that will be available for public consumption upon its completion than putting 10 hours into a project which gets graded, returned, and then either thrown out or forsaken and forgotten. Turning in a paper and getting it back with a letter on it is far less rewarding than submitting an article onto one of the world’s most renowned knowledge bases for all to see. It makes putting all those hours of work into a project seem far more relevant and practical.”

Adrian hopes he’ll be able to use Wikipedia in a forthcoming assignment at Georgetown. Now that he knows how to write for Wikipedia and has experience with the markup, he thinks the assignment will take a lot less time – and he’e eager to continue to participate in useful assignments while at college.

“I applaud the effort—and courage in many cases considering the ridicule Wikipedia often receives in the scholarly community—of university professors working with the Wikimedia Foundation on this project,” Adrian says. “Whether students like it or not, these sorts of assignments (not necessarily with Wikipedia per se, but similar) are increasingly looking to be the way of the future.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative